Help with drive use for Premiere

[tudyniuz]

Hello everyone

I currently have a 3 drive system in my PC and was wondering what the best use of the drives is in order to make Premiere run in the best possible way.

The drives are:

2x 240GB Sandisk SSD's - 500MB/s for read/write speeds

1x 240GB Corsair M.2 drive - 3200MB/s read and about 1800MB/s write

I currently use them like this:

1x 240GB Sandisk SSD - Windows 10

1x 240GB Corsair M.2 drive - Adobe Premiere + After Effects + all the media I use in my project (including all videos, music, photos, etc)

1x 240GB Sandisk SSD - Scratch Disk

Question 1: Is there a better way to distribute the space across the 3 drives?

Question 2: Would a fourth drive help? I was also considering getting a fourth regular SSD and have the following setup:

1x 240GB Samsung SSD - Windows 10

1x 240GB Corsair M.2 drive - Adobe Premiere + After Effects + all the media

2x 240GB Sandisk SSD in Raid 0 - Scratch disk

or I could do this:

1x 240GB Samsung SSD - Windows 10

1x 240GB Corsair M.2 drive - Adobe Premiere + After Effects + all the media

1x 240GB Sandisk SSD - Media (so all the videos, music, photos used)

1x 240GB Sandisk SSD - Scratch disk

I am thinking that the M.2 drive that has speeds of 3200MB/s read and 1800MB/s write is the one that should hold the media files, as it's the quickest to open them, but since it would also be running Premiere itself, it may be slowed down.

What I want the most is for faster preview rendering, not exports themselves.

Any thoughts/ideas are welcomed. Thanks in advance.

[Peru Bob]

I've moved this to the Hardware Forum where the real hardware experts hang out.

[RoninEdits]

for adding another ssd to raid-0 scratch for faster speeds, it would depend on the scratch files being written. if they are uncompressed/raw high resolution preview/cache files then there is a chance a single ssd won't keep up. also, if the original media files are compressed or medium-to-low bitrate, they might not need the speed of the m.2. so in a scenario like that, it could be better to have the m.2 as the scratch/cache disk and the sata ssd for the media. you should be able to see with windows 10 task manager the disk usage, to get an idea if any drive in your current setup is being overworked. you could also do a test project and move some media and scratch/cache to different drives, to see if there is any performance difference. with drives at 240gb, unless you are working with 1-2 minute long projects, i think its unlikely you are working with any media or scratch that needs super fast drives.

if you are using uncompressed/raw scratch files the ssd speed can be important, but otherwise its the cpu that will doing most of the work while rendering previews. you can check the cpu usage in windows task manager while rendering previews. if its very high or maxed, a faster cpu will be the primary suspect for faster preview rendering. while your at it, you could also see what your video card is doing during preview renders with gpu-z,  look for gpu load %.

[tudyniuz]

Thank you very much for your thorough response.

I will try out some different scenarios with media and scratch disk on different drives to see if I see any differences in that. I am usually working with medium to low bitrate as you've said (100-200mb/s), not raw or uncompressed, so I guess that means the drives themselves don't matter as much?

I am just trying to make the best of the system that I have. After previous research online, most answers I found were saying that higher clock speeds for CPU's make for better previews rendering, while more cores on the CPU result in better export times. Would you say that's true?

As for the video card, I have checked it out with GPU-Z when I thought a upgrade is due, but it almost never goes above 70% usage, not when rendering previews and not when exporting.

[RoninEdits]

premiere works differently with different media and timelines, but in general, rendering previews can top out as early as 4-6 cpu cores. so an i7 6-core cpu, overclocked to get the fastest core speeds, will generally be a good cpu choice.